Golley — We had some paper processes for package routing, and frankly, staff was happy with the paper processes. But as soon as everybody was at home, it became a requirement that we automate and digitize those processes.
So there might be a policy that would have to be signed by the chief operating officer or chairman, and we’d have a cover sheet put on the package in order for it to be routed from one director to another. We created a workflow that simulated that experience digitally.
Also, everybody immediately wanted to videoconference. We made a decision to go with Webex, and we worked with Cisco to enable everyone to get access quickly. We had a user support team that was on call to help them with any problems. I was really impressed with how focused the team was. Working from home, they stepped up, they learned the new technologies quickly and met needs as people had them. We had our first virtual board meeting using Webex in April. Everyone, including the chairman, participated in that meeting from home.
Noga — One of the things I have under my purview is our enterprise operations center, the nerve center for monitoring our applications and infrastructure. Having those people not there, having that only minimally manned, that was a bit of a concern. But people are adjusting and using the collaboration tools, doing their monitoring from wherever they are, and it’s worked out well.
Employees transitioned to telework status, and they continued to do their jobs, across the board. Before, we had deployed technology, including laptops and cloud technologies like SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. We had the capabilities in place, and we were able to exercise them immediately once we moved to full-time telework. We have redundant VPN solutions. We did experience some issues with that early on. For the first couple of weeks, we were battling some reliability issues due to capacity and were moving from around 3,000 sessions per day to around 12,000 sessions per day. We worked with AT&T to fix that, and we haven’t had a significant VPN issue since.